ECONOMICS

New Zealand's Crown Research Institute's AgResearch has multiplied the power of its Linux supercomputer at Invermay by 10 times with the addition of 64 Hewlett-Packard 3 gigahertz dual-processor blade servers. The Top500 places the system at 333rd globally. Wellington's Weta Digital occupies two spots – 44 and 48. The new systems at AgResearch cost "hundreds of thousands" of dollars and add to an existing group of 64 Pentium 1.2GHz computers and a recently installed storage area network with 4 terabytes of capacity. AgResearch is also evaluating Intel Itanium-based computer systems to replace its existing Alpha 64-bit database servers. The supercomputer is used for computationally-intensive biological research. General manager of IT Phillip Lyndsay says AgResearch is "continually pushing the boundaries" and has started investigating an upgrade to four-processor blades. He says AgResearch had a "modicum of interest" in Weta Digital's recently-revealed plan to rent out 500 blade servers used to make the Lord of the Rings, but won't take up the offer. AgResearch won't rent out its own supercomputer power, as its first priority is its own research groups, he says. Dr Lyndsay says when a very high speed network, such that described in the Next Generation Internet proposal, comes to fruition then AgResearch will be interested in using Grid computing technologies to share loads with other supercomputers at peak times.